We celebrate individual achievements. We love to highlight the work of the Oscar-winning actor, the Grand Slam champion player, and the entrepreneur of the year. We place CEOs like Marissa Mayer, Presidents like Reagan, and Supreme Court judges like Ruth Bader Ginsberg on pedestals for their individual achievement. But while we love to celebrate the individual, all successful people know you need a great team around you to reach these heights. You can’t achieve anything exceptional alone.
This is why I love these three books on teamwork and leadership. Each book shares personal stories of team leaders, backed by documented research, to show how you can lead teams so you can achieve big goals in your work and life.
How Winning Works
How Winning Works is based on Robyn Benincasa’s experiences as a member of a World Champion Adventure Racing team and as part of a firefighting team in San Diego. Adventure Racing—or expedition racing—is where small teams of men and women go to remote parts of the world in Asia, Africa, and South America and race for 6-10 days, non-stop. During the race, each team member must stay within 50 meters of each other as they bike, hike, paddle, and run across mountains and rivers. So it takes incredible teamwork to win.
Benincasa’s book is half adventure story and half practical applications for leading teams. When you’re not enjoying the wild stories of how her team overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles, you’re learning how to apply team principles to your life and work. Her advice on mutual respect, we thinking, and adversity management is worth the price of the book alone.
The Best Team Wins
In The Best Team Wins by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, these bestselling authors look at the new science of high performance. Based on their study of over 850,000 employee engagement surveys, Gostick and Elton look at “understanding generations” in the workplace on a broader scale than just new-age millennial dynamics.
Today’s teams aren’t just made up of millennials but rather a diverse mix of generations from the greatest generation to generation Z. The surprising thing about these generations is not how different they are, but how much they have in common. Using engaging examples from their research, you’ll learn how to manage teams according to their five leadership principles, how to motivate your teams, and 101 ways to inspire them.
Unstoppable Teams
Alden Mills is a teamwork thought leader who learned the fundamentals of teamwork through his successful experiences as a Navy SEAL Commander. He then applied these principles to turn his company Perfect Fitness into a market leader.
In his book, Unstoppable Teams, Mills shares colorful anecdotes from his military training, as the founder of Perfect Fitness, and his research on teamwork to explain the C.A.R.E approach to leading high-performance teams. Success was never certain in any task he approached but he found when his teammates all communicated and respected each other, they could come up with ideas to overcome any challenge they faced.
And so can you, if you just read these books and apply their principles.
Read more: On Our Bookshelf: The Knowing-Doing Gap